Photographic courage

It's been a busy busy past weekend, photographically speaking. I did the prelim shots for the art gallery I mentioned somewhere below, with a view to putting together some options for choice, so when I get to doing the job (with a lovely guy called Fred Croft, who I think I'm going to learn a stack from) we know what exactly it is that we are aiming for. There is a lot of stuff to shoot, and knowing what people want up front makes us efficient. I really liked one of the paintings, and (naievely) asked how much it might cost. Half a million U$ was the answer - mmmm, looks li. The furniture was really fantastic, and I liked this bench above, built out of slats of wood with holes inbetween. I shot it like this to pull the colours and I think it has a space-ship like quality to it as an image. To get the outcome we wanted I shot things in a number of ways, textures, backgrounds etc. The stuff was just beautiful. It's incredible the things that humans are capable of making, such refined detail and shape and texture - quite lovely. It was also a nice change shooting stuff that didn't move. Much easier I can tell you.

Later that day I worked with Jens at a family portrait shoot. I love working with him. And this is the reason for the post title, I've discovered that it takes some courage to go into someone's home and point a camera into their face from close range with blinding lights when they are looking at you with these sort's of expressions below. These are desaturated portraits I am experimenting with, washed out if you like. GR bought me a beautiful book some time ago called Karoo Morning which featured desat images that I liked. In reality these were very lovely people, despite the slightly morbid looks. I really like all the images I've posted here - there is a lot of authenticity and calm acceptance in them, and I think that the image of the littel girl on her rocking horse is positively regal. The more bald grandfather also had a lovely twinkle in his eye. It's always a challenge shooting people with flash lighting when they are wearing glasses too - because your soft boxes can come out as eye-obscuring reflections - you can see the start of one of these in the bottom left hand photo.

The weekend before I did a family shoot of some children. It was a hugely bright day, and I wanted to take photos in the garden, but it was way too contrasty, and with a test shot on Courtney (she agreed to work as my helper, thankfully) she came out greenish because there was such a reflection coming off the grass. In the end I used a doorway into the house, put the kids in that and had Courtney hold up a white reflector - very simple, very good quality diffuse light. I prefer the feel to that produced by studio lighting; there's a softness to it where studio lights are so intrusive. The little girl in the middle has devastatingly lovely eyes, not really evident here though. She'd also landed on her pip at some point so had the bruise and bump that you can see.

Thanks so much for your text on Sunday, I really appreciated getting it; hope you're toasting the quiz time, and looking forward to some freedom.